Doctor I Knew
by Jack Brocket
Summary: "Doctor Who" is the story (the bits and scraps, at least, that a few among the British have been able to piece together) of the Doctor as they've known him. Here are the rest of the pieces. This is the Doctor I knew. Starts with 11, will include all Doctors, all/most companions, some/several OCs. I have no idea what I'm doing.


**So I did a prologue type thing. There is nothing after this as of right now. I have no idea what I'm doing. But my whole brain just went, 'What the hell!'**

**Standard disclaimers, etc.**

**-J**

* * *

The Doctor's time machine had a Name. Not many people knew it. Actually, no people knew it. Person. One person: the Doctor. Just as no living entity knew his Name, except for her. And his time machine was a her - she had established that quite vehemently the day they met. He had looked into her through what had then been an organic orifice as big as him; the sleek, purplish interlocking wings had disentangled themselves with a whisper like leaves, revealing to the twenty-year-old child little but a blue glow. That glow had scared him almost as much as the Untempered Schism had - here was the ultimate badge of adulthood. Once he got past that blue glow, he would be a man. He would join the ranks of the proud travellers, scholars, architects and champions. He would cease to be a mundane Gallifrean and, once and for all time, become a Time Lord.

And that was not all. No indeed; it was the least of his worries. For he stood, right now, he, a Gallifrean boy, before his life mate.

His executioner.

Urgent shouts behind him. He glanced back to see them coming, some running and others flying, their hoverpads streaks of blinding silver-red in the high noon sun, faces as yet indistinguishable. A dozen faceless Gallifreans and Time Lords and Elders descending on him.

But perhaps, he thought wildly, they couldn't see him yet; there were hundreds of defunct or still-growing time machines between him and them.

Another more distant facet of his mind, one that was calm, thought mildly: an honour guard of twelve. Thirteen including him. Never in Gallifrean history had any new Time Lord had so many stand for his Watch. It would do.

The sheer cheek of that thought boosted his courage so much that he turned to the time machine and stepped almost lazily in.

There was nothing to see. Or there was, but he couldn't see it; his sensory circuits were overpowered by the massive, alien presence of the time machine. She greeted him, enveloped him, mingled her Self with his until they were not two separate beings, but one.

_What is your Name? _He thought perhaps he had opened his mouth to speak the words, but he was not quite sure. Maybe he didn't even think the words. He needn't.

She presented him with a flurry of images - no, _impressions_, without even the solidity of images - for which it would never be possible to find a speakable manifestation. But the name made him _feel_. It felt like… dancing, like elders dancing fast around a bonfire in some ancient rite, chanting the Old Words in time to a mad, impossible, rapid-fire beat.

Well, no. Not quite. Nothing so concrete.

_What is yours? _She wanted to know. She didn't ask. That was impossible. But he knew she wanted to know. So he told her. _Who Hears the Song. _Even these were not words, even these were only a meaning, the essence the words tried to touch.

_You hear it always. _She knew_. It is here, in the back of your mind, always. Even before the Schism?_

_Even before. Only less clear then; the Schism seemed to tear a hole in some cloth between me and the song. Now…_

_Now the song is you. Through it you see the turn of the universe. Through it you feel the storm at the centre of every sun. _

He had no reply.

_Are you all like this? You are not what I expected a Time Lord to be._

_I'm not a Time Lord._

_No. Would you like to be?_

The question was warm, free of any malice, but a shaft of fear lanced through him. This was it. But he was already answering. The conviction surprised him.

_Yes. Will you make me a Time Lord, Dances Wild? _

_I will, Who Hears the Song. Will you make me fly?_

_I will._

He found her console. His small hands had never touched such controls as hers, but they knew - with her help and years of training - precisely what to do.

Where to? When to?

Anywhere and any when.

One last stab of fear as he grasped the joystick. The time machine told him not to be afraid. He would not end. He would become a Time Lord. All the same, his heart beat like a drum, taut and racing.

_Dances, _he pleaded.

_Don't fear. _She was like sound, all around him, like flutes and voices, confident and joyful. She synchronised with the song he never ceased to hear. With a start he realised that he too, for all his racing pulse, harmonised with it. He smiled.

And pulled the central stick.

Later, he could never remember what it felt like. He knew in his mind that It was necessary for him to become a Time Lord, and for her to become what he would later call a TARDIS, but he never knew exactly what _It _was. Because the two of them survived It, he underwent the regeneration process that had been impossible to his Gallifrean body. Because they survived It, he awoke with two hearts instead of one. Dances Wild undertook the leap into the vortex that had not been possible until the moment they survived It. Because they survived It, she became bigger on the inside.

They did not have time to grasp anything. He had emerged from Dances Wild's portal to find, not the red field with his twelve Watchers, but an alien world. Death and destruction, grief and despair, black and grey and ash and bone.

He decided then on his name. He would be the Doctor. And to prove his name, he spent nine years on that ashen wasteland. He found people to save, and although he didn't know how to be their Doctor, he learned in the doing. The ragged band of survivors came together, two by two and three by three, to rebuild. To endure. And when the sun and the day moon dawned on the ninth year, the young Doctor stood in the door of a ramshackle hut on the fringes of a ramshackle village. He looked at the little town, cleared of ash and debris and dotted instead with gardens and animals and laughter, and he knew that it was done. So he said goodbye to the friends he had made, and they pressed gifts on him, and made him a household god. The Doctor left with his TARDIS, and they were both satisfied with his first, shining achievement.

'Home.' The young Doctor said, working the controls of the console. Dances Wild hummed gladly in the back of his mind.

But they miscalculated. When the young Doctor stepped through the portal, he was surprised to step out through a pair of blue wooden doors. This was the first time Dances Wild had changed her shape; on the ashen world it had not been necessary. He appraised her now. 'Police.' What sort of police needed a big blue box?

A scream arose to his distant left, and the young Doctor forgot the disguise and began to run.

And he hasn't stopped.


End file.
